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> Plenty of people spend hours drawing and still suck at it.

Definitely, but people don't get good at drawing without spending hours at it.

You may be stuck at a local maximum, and it may take a good or different coach to get you around it, but generally you can always improve.

But just trying harder is ineffective. You have to diagnose your problem, and how to fix it. Maybe you need a coach.

I remember having to "invent" all kinds of ways of looking at my drawings to get better. To get them to the next level. After a while you can't look at them objectively ... so you look at them in a mirror. You squint, to get a better sense of the balance. Upside down. You get the idea. It's problem solving.

I think of drawing as learning to see.

I got comments on my artwork in kindergarten due to level of detail and such things. I was oil painting landscapes at age 8.

I took every elective I could in school, and would have taken more if AP and college prep classes weren't a priority for my parents. I used how-to books, and I still look up techniques from time to time. I've had lots and lots of practice: I went for years drawing and painting daily. That was probably my biggest increase in quality. I used to wish for art school.

My current liking is doing surrealist and visionary art in watercolor and ink: I've currently 3 canvases waiting on acrylic.

And through it all, I truly think it is a combination of talent plus practice plus interest/focus in some form. Most folks with enough practice can make beautiful landscapes and still life pictures, just like folks can learn to take a basic excellent picture most times. Everyone can learn basics.

Not everyone can bend their minds in ways to incorporate subdued symbolism in surrealist work - not everyone can look at a canvas in that way. Some of the really great photography is because the person thought to take the picture - not everyone does that in that way. Not everyone can create. That is where the talent bit comes in.

However, if art didn't interest me, I very much doubt I would have filled my time with it to get better.

I think this works similarly for math and other things, for the majority of us.

To clarify, can we reduce your point down to "natural talent doesn't exist?"

Its interesting to compare artistic drawing to drafting.

My observations from a year of drafting in high school (Future engineers need to be able to make and read blueprints was a fad a couple decades ago) and work with people in the field, there are people who can do three dimensional transforms and manipulations in their head with little effort beyond the mere mechanics of pencil on paper (or fingers on CAD workstation). There are also those who cannot visualize complex shapes in three dimensions. Just like you can't verbally tell people to train harder to grow taller it does not appear possible to learn how to visualize. I've observed those who can't visualize have all kinds of interesting coping mechanisms ranging from simply asking for help to leaving the field entirely to really elaborate memorized heuristics. Either you can, or cannot, visualize a basic transmission for a crane complete with which direction the gears rotate. No amount of staring at a blank sheet of paper will help, and practice does not help those people who can't and merely wastes the time of those who can.

Apparently you can train creativity and style, but the mental act of three dimensional visualization is either functional or absent.

I suspect tradeoffs on underlying performance as the cause for Aphantasia. There's a guy in Sonoma I met and he can see in 3D like I feel it, but then he can put textures on the model and see that. Visualize it. He's also monochrome color blind, so it's a tradeoff. He makes really awesome wooden furniture.

>not because of some single minded focus as she had ~10 AP classes and ended up High school Valedictorian.

So you're saying she did have a single-minded focus on school?

School took a lot of time, but was not her main focus.

Considering she wanted to be an artist and mostly did that on the side, school was a net loss of time. It's one thing to scrape a C and doodle in all your classes, it's another to find time to draw on the side in the middle of a hectic schedule. Getting a 5 in AP calculus is hard for most people who want to use it, for someone who has little interest in math that's a huge time investment.

AKA if you do one thing well then you can argue it's a time investment, when you do everything well that takes something more.

makeup is drawing

I dont want to detract from your story, but

>has an IMDB page

is a funny metric for success.

She wanted to work as an artist for Disney as a kid, realized that would take a lot of effort and put the time in. Considering how many other people try and do the same thing and fail it seems like a reasonable metric for success.

It's a surprisingly brutal world. She got into CalArts which has a 27.5% acceptance rate and the application takes a lot of time, so I suspect they scare off a lot of people.

I like that metric, because I was considered super smart as a kid, and I have two IMDB credits. (one even a Sundance winner)

But I failed the other criteria in the article, inventions (even if I invented a certain computer-game-as-artform category in the 90ies), PhD, scientific success, ...

Yes, it's a funny metric. And even if e.g. Cannes states that you can attend the festival if you are on IMDB, they never let me in. (Nowadays I wouldn't want to either because of politics) So it's inconsistent also.

I thought that was kind of a weird evidence of success at art but I guess the person was in animation/special effects?

> My sister spent hours with a coloring book as a kid, and now has a growing IMDB page

Anyone in SAG can have an IMDB page. I know this because I have a child who has one after doing some trivial commercial and short film work...it really isn't a high bar, sorry.

Uhh, I mean creating real movies like Big hero Six at Disney. You know the kind of thing that's shown a most movie theaters and you can find their name in the credits.

Yea, it's not curing cancer. But, I know a lot more failed artists than successful ones.

Okay, the people who serve lunch to the movie crew also gets their names in credits. She has a job...cool, but its not any more meaningful than anything else because her industry makes you look at a scrolling list of everyone related to the project.

Having artistic credits aka not just being a gofer on several major animated films is a significantly more exclusive club than being a tenured professor at an Ivy League School, or being a lawyer at a major law firm. So, when that's the goal it's a reasonable measure for success.

People can always add an arbitrary benchmark. But, having reached a major and difficult life goal at mid twenty is further than the vast majority of people out there.